I’m not always a fan of Bill Safire’s, but I find little in this column with which to disagree.
But won’t the Iraqi people be driven crazy by pictures from Abu Ghraib prison and embrace the pro-Saddam terrorists? My Kurdish friends say that’s nonsense. They remember the 5,000 innocents Saddam gassed to death in Halabja
Well, here’s a side of sports I didn’t need to know about.
Well, here’s a side of sports I didn’t need to know about.
Well, here’s a side of sports I didn’t need to know about.
The media outlets don’t want to show the beheading video.
“It’s a pretty clear call for us,” said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “I think the viewer will understand what happened to Mr. Berg. They won’t have to sit through the graphic images.”
Yup, just as they don’t have to sit through the graphic images of people plunging from the towers. Apparently they only show (and reshow) graphic images when it’s of American “atrocities.”
Note that I’m not necessarily complaining that they’re not showing the video. But some of those same media outlets should be asking themselves to what degree showing all of the Abu Ghraib photos may have resulted in this, and why they considered that necessary. After all, couldn’t the viewers have understood what went on in the prison without the graphic images?
And since we’ve been told that even worse photos are coming in the days ahead, perhaps they’ll give the matter a little more consideration before airing them?
[Wednesday morning update]
Ratherbiased.com has similar questions for CBS and Dan Rather.
I was going to do a satire on the bizarro world in which this actually might occur, but the Ace of Spaces beat me to it. He has other, pertinent aerospace-related news, too.
..engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that they had successfully granted a 200-pound sow the power of flight. “We just grafted four pairs of condor wings on to the pig,” said Henry Fields, project manager of the Winged Wilbur project. “You should see that pig fly. It’s something to behold, I’ll tell you. And we’re going to need flying pig technology in the future, given the widespread effects of global environmental change. The latest reports of the temperatures plummeting in Hell should be a warning to us all.”
[Update at 5:40 PM PDT]
Scrappleface has apparently been visiting that planet as well.
We need to get the cost of access to space down so we can all move there.
Now here’s a poor guy who couldn’t catch a break.
First, he’s gelded in a circumcision accident, then he’s raised as a girl at the instigation of a psychologist who believes that gender is a social construct, then after rebelling against this forced gender swap at the age of fifteen, he has to undergo reconstructive surgery and remove the breasts that grew as a result of the hormone treatments, and last week, as a result of a financial fraud that impoverished him, he committed suicide.
As the article says, he made a valuable contribution to science, providing major evidence against the Blank Slate hypothesis, and showing the folks who think that gender is infinitely malleable to be terminally deluded. Thanks to him, perhaps no other little boys will have to go through what he went through.
RIP, David Reimer.
Would this have happened absent the Abu Ghraib scandal?
Who knows? I think they would have found some other excuse. I mean, it’s not like they’ve never done such things before, on far less pretense.
Like many of their vicious acts, I expect that this will have exactly the opposite of the desired effect.
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Yes, we all know about Google’s “rules and regulations.” I wonder if they’re trying to play off all the buzz about the IPO?
And they only want a hundred bucks.
New Mexico has been selected to host the X-Prize Cup.
[Update]
Here’s more info.
[Another update]
Here’s more from the New York Times. It’s very confusing–they seem to be conflating the Ansari X-Prize with the X-Prize Cup, which will be a separate annual competitive event, much like the Americas Cup of sailing.
[One more]
Leonard David has fleshed out the story more, with a better explanation of what the X-Prize Cup (which is what this story is about) is about.